The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  “I am.You have to come,” she’d said, and led him back up the hill to their house, and to her room, where she had gotten down on stomach and elbows and disinterred from the assorted heaps under her bed the pilfered library book. She’d shown him the page with the bones and the ashes, the white cloth, the egg and the burnt string. He’d sat holding the book on his lap at the foot of her bed, while she’d huddled at the head with a stuffed animal clutched to her chin (a powder blue rabbit; she’d never been sentimental about any one stuffed animal, but retained a sizable menagerie to which she felt attached as a group), and watched him read, her view increasingly obscured by blue fur as she shrank lower onto her pillow. She saw the light dawn, saw him connect her antics, each successive transgression, with one of the funeral customs detailed in the book.

  “Oh,” he’d said at last. “This has all been about”—after a small hesitation he pronounced the name nobody ever said—“Simon.” A long, cleansing sigh. “I didn’t know you thought about him.” He’d leaned back against the wall, squishing a bear, a cat, and a large velour grasshopper in the process, and pulled his fingers mullingly down the side of his beard. “I think about him, too. We didn’t—Biscuit, why are you hiding behind that rabbit?”

  She’d shrugged, unable for the moment to speak. She was in some peculiar fashion overcome—with an urge to laugh, it seemed, although that did not begin to cover it. So much was happening. All her imaginary scripts coming to life.

  “We never did have a funeral,” her father continued slowly, nodding as though agreeing with something Biscuit had just pointed out. After a minute he’d picked up the book again and began paging through it. “Listen to this,” he said, and read aloud a description of a Ukrainian practice. Then a silence, interrupted by a new find: “This one’s interesting.” From Senegal. More minutes, more page turning, then something from Bali. He read aloud to her the varied customs of grief, from this country and that, from one people and another. Biscuit, listening initially from behind her rabbit-screen, but eventually surrendering this and moving in close to lean an elbow on her father’s knee, let him curve an arm behind her back and snuggled close against him, in the way she used to when she was small and he’d read to her of Scuffy and Maisie and Pooh.

  The steps by which last Saturday’s unplanned private encounter had led to this Saturday’s planned family event remained unknown to Biscuit, part of the whole impenetrable world of adult communications and machinations, a world she was, on the whole, perfectly content not to comprehend.

  Simply, on Wednesday night at supper her parents had asked what she and Paul would think about their having a small family funeral for the baby. Okay, the kids had responded, both immediately shy.Whether Paul knew the question had been prompted by Biscuit she did not know and was in no rush to say. But he refrained, amazingly, from cracking any jokes, and her parents were full of solemnity, and for a dismal moment Biscuit had thought the whole thing was to indulge her: a sham funeral complete with sham mourning, like what they’d done for her years ago—because she could see now that it had been an indulgence, kindly meant but still essentially fraudulent—when they’d all gathered in their best clothes and helped her lay the fallen bird to rest in its poor, shabby grass-lined shoe box beneath the bridal wreath bush.

  But then she’d seen the fork trembling in her mother’s hand, and her mother had dropped the fork with a clatter and put both hands quickly in her lap, where she seemed to be pressing them together. “I’m sorry we didn’t do this before,” her mother said, her gaze flicking swiftly to Biscuit’s father, then back to Paul and Biscuit, each in turn, before ending up vaguely in the area of the butter dish.

  “That’s okay,” Paul had been quick to assure her, and Biscuit had chimed in, “Yeah, that’s okay.”

  “This’ll be our time,” her mother had added, very softly, but with a kind of resolution, “to say good-bye as a family.”

  The words had seemed to travel out and hang above the table, ominous, peculiar, with a singing sharpness. Good-bye as a family. Biscuit turned the words around in her head like marbles in her mouth, helplessly, over and over, until they grew as smooth and lost the distinction of meaning, were reduced to raw sound.

  She resurrected them now, sitting on top of the cold radiator and watching her father cover the bowl of pancake batter with plastic wrap. Good-bye as a family. Was this morning’s ceremony about more than laying Simon, the idea of Simon, to rest? Simon. Simon Isaac. She had seen him once. In the hospital. The day she’d learned to walk like she owned the place. Her father had taken her and Paul to visit their mother; that’s what he had said—not “Mom and the baby,” just “Mom”—and Biscuit had been anxious about seeing her in a hospital bed; but when they arrived in the room her mother had been sitting in a chair by the window, and she had not been alone, as Biscuit imagined, but held the baby—Biscuit’s brother—in her arms, wrapped all in white wrappings like a mummy, sort of, a tiny mummy with just a bit of exposed face, teacup-fine and still: porcelain eyes shut and porcelain lips shut and minutely curved nose, with its nostrils, so black and elegant, small as peppercorns.

  Was there, Biscuit wondered, turning a freshly apprehensive eye on her father’s creased trousers and necktie, on the somber solicitousness with which he was now setting the table, handling the juice glasses and the plates with suspect care and caution, moving as though to avoid incident, accident, unnecessary harm—was there another purpose to the family’s gathering today?

  People thought she was little but she was not so little. People thought she was always lost in her fancies, her private conversations, the things she made up to believe in her head. But she saw. She heard. She’d known something was wrong—more wrong, extra wrong—between her parents these past few weeks. Hardspat whispers behind their bedroom door. Mistimed hugs, incompletely reciprocated. Stealthy footsteps on the stairs: too late at night, too early in the morning, always traveling in the wrong directions. The mandolin handed off in front of them all. The clear, heavy, rectangular bottle on the table that night when Biscuit had woken from her sweaty dream and crept downstairs, reaching the threshold to the kitchen in time to hear her mother’s terrible question, the words that had cracked from her throat and spilled backward like salt into the holes of the phone: Am I good?

  7.

  What more is there to tell? What else ought to be, must be, said? If it were to end here, would anything of importance remain in doubt?

  Would it, for example, make any difference to know that Ricky and Paul came home just then, he with his index finger hooked through a gallon of orange juice; she with an armload of blooms: five sunflowers, one for each Ryrie, as long as her arm, their heads, bright, fiery as hammered brass, poking out of a paper cone? That Ricky and Paul were each, like John, dressed in formal best, and that Paul had washed and combed his hair (and forsaken his hat) so that the high white dome of his forehead showed clear for the first time in months? That a tripping, trilling laugh nearly erupted from Biscuit to see him this way, in such a state of spit and polish, and that this laugh trembled and faded from her throat, supplanted by a stronger feeling, a staggering lunge of gratitude, of pure, unstrained affection—or no, name it: love?

  That when her mother said, “Still in pj’s?” and Biscuit hopped off the radiator and ran, her lavender robe flapping, upstairs where she wriggled into her sole skirt, her sole blouse (fetched from the general pile of debris beneath her bed), she was overcome by such a tidal wave of feeling, a mix of dread and perverse gaiety all at once, she had to steady herself with a hand on the banister as she went back downstairs, admonish herself to don a solemnity suitable to the occasion?

  That when Biscuit reached the front hall and found her family waiting there, her mother holding a small, corrugated cardboard box, smaller, even, than the bird’s coffin—a box whose existence had not been known to her but whose provenance and purpose she instantly apprehended—she did not have to work to don that solemnity, because it fell heavily, decis
ively upon her?

  Or—leap forward—would it make a difference to know that at the edge of the river, where the family processed with its small, difficult burden, it was John who extracted the inner sack from the box in Ricky’s hands, who undid the twist tie and stretched open the clear plastic mouth, and that he offered it first to Biscuit? That her insides became jelly at the sight of the contents, their mottled grayness and their paucity; that she croaked, “With my hand?” and Ricky said, “Oh, John . . .” but then Biscuit did it, thrust her bare hand in and gathered a handful of milled ash and bone? That Paul went next, then Ricky and finally John, who finished by tipping up the bag and shaking the last of its contents into the river, and that they all bent then at the rocky shoreline and washed their hands in the water, rinsed the cremated body of their brother, their son, all together, each at his or her separate, identical task, the way they’d used to wash up at Cabruda Lake, brushing their teeth and soaping their hands and faces at the end of the dock?

  What else could need telling? That they met Gordie and Ebie as they walked back up the hill, that Gordie acted embarrassed about catching them in their relative finery, but that his real embarrassment was over being caught himself: patrolling yet again outside their house, where he continued to feel drawn even with Jess gone? That they invited him in for pancakes; that Paul, for once, was affable toward him, struck up a conversation, asked him questions about his dad’s boxes, which were still lined up thickly along the Ryries’ living room mantel as though they’d put down runner roots and were proliferating there, this cache of alternative worlds; that Ricky and John said little and ate less, but found one another’s hands beneath the table and that this unpublic intertwining of their fingers was the most intimacy they’d shared in more than a year; that Biscuit, noticing the former but not the latter, and fancying she felt her brother’s ashes on her tongue, and the gray lady’s gaze upon them all, found herself also less than hungry; that Ebie sat throughout the meal resting her muzzle on Biscuit’s knee, and that she alone ate well?

  And what of the boxes? Would it alter the course of understanding in any meaningful way to know whether Madeleine’s Piers was able to get the Joiner Boxes a show, either in a museum or a gallery, or to persuade the friend’s colleague (or colleague’s friend) to buy one, or two, or the entire lot? What, for that matter, of Madeleine? Is it necessary to know whether she and John kissed that night, whether they took off all their clothes up under the skylight in her crooked little bungalow, or whether John found himself so moved, so shaken—by the wire magician; or by the dead man whose hands had wrought it, whose loneliness had conceived it; or by Madeleine Berkowitz herself and the realization, the revelation of how small he had been and how shamed he was to have ridiculed her all these years; or by the thought of his wife, his troublesome, troubling wife, at that moment still wet-haired from her swim at the Y and waiting for him, with her mix of ingenuity and ingenuousness, her unpardonable absence and her irremediable presence, her lies and fears and honest, enduring appetite for him—that he excused himself in a jumble of apologies and went home chaste?

  Could it be that attempting to answer any of these questions might amount to arrogance, to a kind of conceit verging on blasphemy? Could there be a point beyond which it would be hubris to proceed?

  We know more than we pretend to know. More than we presume we know. Even so, what we know would fill a teaspoon.

  Here, perhaps, is all that’s left to say:

  Elsewhere in Memorial Park, as the four Ryries kneel by the river, rinsing from their hands the ashes of the fifth, a teenage girl in an army jacket is writing curse words on her wrist with a ballpoint pen. Six boys in muscle shirts cut a diagonal across the grass, making noises in imitation of drunkenness. A girl who lost a tooth last night executes her first cartwheel. A man who lost his virginity last night tries to assemble a kite. A young woman with a cane bends to drink from the fountain. A little boy, poking in the dirt, finds what he is sure is a diamond. An old man, scrunching his sandwich wrapper, throws it toward the trash, missing by a foot.

  And now as the Ryries start the climb with their hollow box, heading for home where the pancake batter stands mixed and ready to pour, a red-haired man comes down the hill. He holds the leash of a large black dog, and as they draw even with the middle house on the block, they slow, both of them, man and dog, almost involuntarily, almost without noticing, and turn their heads in concert—a movement inadvertently beautiful, also comic—to look openly, hopefully, toward the door.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Sue and Oscar, for everything;

  to Dr. Richard Barakat and Dr. Carol Aghajanian, for time;

  to Betty Brock, for being a paragon of children’s room librarians and for being ours;

  to Stuart Pizer, for his step-grandfather;

  to Caroline Heller, Lynn Focht, and Martha Nichols for their most felicitous balance of kindness and intelligence;

  to Mary Page, for being an exquisite reader and a teacher to the bone;

  to Gillian Richards and Florence Marc-Charles, for help with Baptiste and his Grann;

  to Ted Simpson, for help with stagecraft;

  to Cathy Jaque, Matt Spindler, Erin Edmison and especially Inge De Taeye, for their icebergian talents and labors, of which I know I glimpsed no more than the proverbial tip;

  to Sarah McGrath, Geoff Kloske, Sarah Stein, and everyone at Riverhead, for their thoughtful and rare care in making this into a book;

  to Barney Karpfinger, for helping me come to understand not only the work but also myself better, and for his increasingly vital friendship these past twenty years;

  to Joan and Arnie and Tam, for coming into the picture; and to George, Rosy, Joe, Barley and Mike, for everything else:

  thank you.

  ALSO BY LEAH HAGER COHEN

  FICTION

  House Lights

  Heart,You Bully,You Punk

  Heat Lightning

  NONFICTION

  Without Apology

  The Stuff of Dreams

  Glass, Paper, Beans

  Train Go Sorry